Every monsoon, same gamble: Why thousands stay in Mumbai’s crumbling buildings despite the risk of collapse

Date Mon 08 Jun 2026 01 35 37 0000 Extracted Body Mayur Mistry 43 looked up at the crumbling building in front of him Many years ago his parents brought him home from the hospital to Hathi Baug in Mazgaon Like his father before him he grew up in the building and the 120 squae feet room shaped the landscape of his childhood and adulthood But now with a child of his own the building no longer feels like a safe place In the run up to the 2026 monsoon Hathi Baug received a notice informing residents of what they already knew Their building was dilapidated highly dangerous and beyond repair The notice however came with a rider The 48 families living in the building would have to vacate within 15 days or risk having their electricity and water connections disconnected or worse risk their lives through the rainy season Like residents of 81 other buildings classified as highly dangerous during MHADA s pre monsoon survey they chose to stay It is residents like Mistry who prompted a Bombay High Court appointed committee to describe it as a miracle that lakhs of Mumbai residents continue to live in structurally unsafe buildings In a report submitted in March the committee warned of a deepening crisis in the city s ageing cessed buildings estimating that nearly four lakh tenants remain trapped in 12 552 such structures many declared dangerous and awaiting redevelopment Yet every monsoon even as notices are pasted on cracked walls warning residents to evacuate thousands choose to remain where they are We will not give up our homes said Mistry pointing to cracks in the roof leaks in every home and bamboo supports holding up parts of the structure Evacuating the building would mean giving up our claim to our homes and losing our tenancy rights That we cannot risk His dilemma is repeated across Mumbai s cessed buildings pre 1969 residential structures whose landlords pay a cess or levy to MHADA in exchange for the authority maintaining and eventually redeveloping them Of the 82 such structures classified as highly dangerous this year 43 had already been declared unsafe before the 2025 monsoon yet residents continue to occupy them In the last three years 935 cessed buildings largely in the island city have been served notices warning of their precarious condition Caught in a web of stalled redevelopment projects legal disputes absentee landlords and uncertainty over rehabilitation thousands of residents continue to languish in ageing buildings that authorities say could collapse around them To leave is safer To stay may be fatal But for many tenants leaving can also mean surrendering the only claim they have to a home they have occupied for generations Tenants were given the hope of a way out through Section 79A of the MHADA Act 1976 which permitted tenants to come up with a redevelopment proposal if the landlord failed to act within the stipulated period said Mukesh Pende of the Pagdi Ekta Sangh which advocates for the rights of pagdi tenants But now that the provision is being argued in court even that option is not available Section 79A was introduced in 2022 to fast track the redevelopment of these ageing properties which are often neglected by landlords for a variety of reasons Under the conventional redevelopment process redevelopment is an option available only to the landlord and MHADA Section 79A invoked when a cessed structure is in a dilapidated condition forced redevelopment in a time bound manner and allowed tenants to take up the initiative The provision ensured that if the landlord refused to redevelop it would not lead to a building collapse and loss of lives noted Milind Shambharkar chief officer of the Mumbai Repairs and Reconstruction Board MRRB The law that offered hope and then stalled However a series of court cases including Vimalnath Shelters vs MHADA and Others and Javed Abdul Rahim Attar vs MHADA and Others cast doubt on the basis of Section 79A namely the declaration of a building as dilapidated or classified as C1 meaning it is beyond repair At the heart of the dispute is a question of jurisdiction whether the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation BMC ... ft in line with benefits available under cluster redevelopment But this time said Shreyas Acharekar a tenant having already lived through one round where nothing materialised we asked the builder to include a simple condition in the agreement that construction would begin within nine to 10 months He refused After consulting a lawyer residents learned that the builder s original NOC had lapsed in 2015 under MHADA regulations However MHADA had not formally cancelled it leaving the project in limbo and preventing repairs from being undertaken through the cess fund Our fight for the past two years has been to get MHADA to cancel the lapsed NOC and either take over the land or appoint another developer said Acharekar even as nearly 70 per cent of residents continue to support the builder We would not mind if the builder commenced redevelopment which he still can But given his track record and what we have learned about his finances we are not enthusiastic about it Despite meetings with politicians across party lines and repeated representations to MHADA officials residents have struggled to secure cancellation of the lapsed NOC The matter is now before the Bombay High Court The chawl opposite Jagannath ... Section 79A notices in 2023 with no word from the landlord the tenants submitted their own redevelopment proposal When MHADA subsequently favoured the landlord s proposal the residents challenged the decision and ultimately won establishing their right to redevelop in the Supreme Court MHADA however did not approve their proposal till Section 79A had been stayed rendering their efforts largely meaningless In 2025 MHADA demolished the building after repeatedly declaring it unsafe All of us tenants are paying rent out of our own pockets with neither rent from MHADA nor any assurance from the landlord said Jagdish Mulchandani who spent years fighting the case This is precisely what worries Mistry and the residents of Hathi Baug While MHADA has offered transit accommodation or rental support many residents find the former unattractive and the latter uncertain There is no guarantee of when or even whether they will return to the homes where their families have lived for generations Redevelopment discussions with Mistry s landlord have yielded no meaningful progress In his neighbourhood he has watched a chawl demolished five years ago remain an empty plot ever since For now staying in a dangerous building appears less risky than leaving it behind